Re: Query about intrinsic verus orbital angular momentum

Jay Yablon wrote in part:

So, would it be off-based to believe that classically speaking, there
really is no such thing as "spin"? That is, to believe that spin is
just a composite of orbital angular momenta for individual infinitesimal
mass elements about an origin. I.e., one can only have a true "spin"
which is not orbital, if one has a true physical "point" that also
coincides with the rotational origin.

Have a careful read of Box 5.6 in Misner, Thorne & Wheeler's
"Gravitation", which defines angular momentum,
and then explains its decomposition into orbital and
intrinsic parts. This is classical, of course, but it's an
essential piece of information needed when trying to
understand this stuff.

Separately, regarding another posting about spin-1/2 emerging
from Dirac wave packets, that's less surprising if one
recalls that the integral and half-integral values for
total spin are a direct consequence of angular momentum
commutation relations, represented unitarily, i.e., in a Hilbert
space.

.

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